School counselors being asked to step up, take more leadership roles

Kathy Smallwood is a counselor at Grand Bay Middle in south Mobile County. She is pictured in a file photo from 2003, when she was named the school's Teacher of the Year. (Courtesy Grand Bay Middle)

MOBILE, Alabama -- The job of school counselor is changing as more districts, including Mobile County, are allowing them to take leadership roles to help improve their schools.

Kathy Smallwood, a counselor at Grand Bay Middle, talked about some of these changes this week during a webinar with a group of education journalists from across the country through the Education Writers Association.

“We have truly transformed counseling in Mobile County,” Smallwood said before detailing how she helped improve students' performance in math at her school last year.

A challenge, she said, is that most school counselors meet with a select few students who have immediate needs. And, in doing so, they overlook the majority of students who need support academically or otherwise.

But, she said, if counselors dig deep into test scores, attendance and other data, they can spot problem areas and come up with a plan to fix them.

That’s part of the focus of the National Center for Transforming School Counseling, which the Mobile County Public School System has been working with for the last couple of years.

Through the program, run through The Education Trust, Smallwood stepped up and helped Grand Bay meet the state’s academic standards last year. Here’s how:

First, she looked at the data and found that eighth-grade math was a big problem at Grand Bay, where 60 percent of the children are poor, which statistically means they struggle academically.

“Our children were not passing pre-algebra, and when they were in the ninth grade, they weren’t passing algebra,” she said.

In fact, only 56 percent of the Grand Bay’s students were passing pre-algebra.

The school, with Smallwood’s help, set a goal to have at least 65 percent of its students pass by the end of the year.

Smallwood and others at the school looked at attendance data and identified a group of 29 students who were most likely to have unexcused absences, tracked them and offered awards for coming to class.

Then, they looked at test scores. Every student who did not perform up to grade level on standardized tests was put in remediation. Smallwood redesigned the master schedule to add 22 remediation classes throughout the day.

“We grouped our students by areas of need, so that we were better able to meet their needs,” she said.

Smallwood held sessions with parents to train them on how they could help their children at home. She monitored individual students and wrote up progress reports.

As a result, 70 percent of students passed pre-algebra, which was even greater than the original goal.

“Counselors have to be involved in the analysis of data,” Smallwood said. “I’m one person in a group of 804 students. I can’t possibly know what every student needs. But the data doesn’t lie.”

A recent survey by the College Board of thousands of counselors and school administrators across the country showed that while most principals believe they are fully utilizing their counselors, most counselors feel they are being under-used.

Oftentimes, said Peggy Hines, with EdTrust, an education reform group based in Washington, D.C., counselors are not involved in school reform efforts as they should be. Most counselors have specialized training and master’s degrees that
aren’t utilized when they’re stuck with some of the more clerical jobs,
such as administering standardized testing and scheduling students.

“They’re seen as ancillary,” she said. Yet, there’s a unique set of knowledge and skills that counselors bring to a school.

“They’re the experts on resistance in schools,” Hines said. “They are trained to deal with resistance, to lead groups, to understand changes. There are many, many things, knowledge and skill sets that literally they are the only person in the building that has that.”

They can tell which students are being served well in school, and which ones are not. And they can teach students life skills that will help them academically, such as time management, goal setting and problem solving, she said.

"Counselors must be willing to step up to the plate," Hines said, and that can be scary. But, she said. "Counselors have to be held accountable" for the success or failures of a school.